Furniture is one of the oldest classes of human-made objects. Furniture has been produced utilizing virtually every type of natural and synthetic material known; however, among the most frequently and longest-used materials for furniture construction is wood.
Wood has been used in furniture and a wide variety of other applications throughout history because of its extraordinary properties of strength and beauty. It is not, however, a particularly easy material to use and must be well understood, and incorporated in careful designs, for successful exploitation of its beauty and capacity for durability.
Notwithstanding the long, virtually world-wide use of wood in the construction of furniture, problems continue to be associated with the use of this material and design of furniture employing it. Furthermore, construction of furniture from wood, particularly solid wood, continues to be a labor-intensive activity, with the result that high-quality furniture products are quite expensive.
Even with widespread use of highly automated machinery in the production of furniture components, conventional furniture designs require substantial quantities of hand labor. Additionally, the enormous variety of furniture designs and sizes of furniture pieces of particular designs demand equally substantial numbers of different components, frequently sized to be usable solely in a single piece of furniture.
While furniture has been designed using countless approaches, most of those approaches have involved the identification of overall form, or the definition of function followed by the identification of form, and then the design of components of that form. In these conventional approaches components tend to be quite specific to particular furniture forms (such as a particular chair, bed or chest of drawers design), and aesthetic considerations often dominate structural considerations. Expressed differently, appearance considerations are often substantially separate from engineering considerations, in the conventional design of furniture components.
While not normally thought of in the same way as freestanding furniture, cabinets, particularly kitchen cabinets, have frequently been designed after specifying certain standard measurement parameters. For instance, many conventional cabinets have been designed in two inch incremental widths and are designed to have a standard counter height such as thirty inches. More recently, face-frameless or "European" style cabinets have been designed around a 32 millimeter increment for certain measurements. In both types of cabinets, design proceeds from definition of function and identification of overall form to the design of components, and most or all components are produced from man-made sheet materials.